was epicurus happy? allegedly he was just a simple guy who was quite fond of cheese. so much for hedonism. that people confuse happiness and pleasure is i think a well established fact (or is is?) i wonder whether anyone actually knows what it is, this happiness business -that is- happiness detached from pleasure, contentment, and all other surrogates. because pleasure is quantifiable but happiness is ontological, and ontology can't be quantified... you can't have degrees of being, you either are or you are not. quantifying ontology is plain contradictory! so... talk of simplicity versus luxury, poverty versus richness, humble versus proud, the simple pleasures versus the more exquisite counterparts all amount to nothing if being is not being. we can make a list of conditions for happiness, perhaps like epicurus did, but again: its all ridiculously relative! uselessly quantitative! no, we need to get to the crunch. but then of course, this talk of being vs. non being gets you into unavoidable circularities... as you attempt to establish what makes being be as opposed to not be, and really we're back at the beginning. for how does being come to be? or must it always be because if it were not then how would you logically (not to mention practically) make the leap from not-being to being? and we're back to genesis! big bang! presocratic philosophy! the first question and the last question of all, that inescapable fence of epistemology!
so maybe only epicurus knew if he was happy, and let me tell you it didn't depend on the cheese!
but i think i've had it though, that happiness of the ontological kind, the one that holds within it the promise of eternity, the one where for that millisecond you are all eternity, spread out over the cosmos to infinity and yet so comfortably grounded in that speck of dust that is your own exemplification of the human, all too human...
and then it's gone, suddenly, a tabula rasa, a slate wiped clean by the torrent of causality... like for example right now, the realization (and dread) of what awaits me in some short amount of hours, and the awareness of the narrowness of that vision that is my own, of the immediacy of the not yet lived...
a volte bisogna guardare al di fuori...
sometimesone must look outside...of the self... of the window... of the immediate.

...a wisp of curly smoke makes pretty circles in the sunlight.